Very true... I was called round to someone who's ADSL wasn't working and hadn't been all day. It turned out, that there was an outage on the telecom's network but while on the phone to the ISP's support line they either had no idea, or were trying to cover up their own outage. So they ran off their usual script, and eventually blamed the hardware. When i came round in the evening, the outage had ended so it came back up immediately.
I have no idea to be honest... I can't imagine their support for windows would be that bad, or there would be plenty of people complaining about them. That said, i have only used mine on Linux and OSX on which I have no complaints.
With more competition in the OS market (ie different vendors following the same set of standards so you could pick and choose easily) this wouldn't happen. If vendor X only offered a half assed version, aside from pirate versions you'd also be able to get a legitimate system from vendor Y which offered the same or more features.
Must have been a fairly old crack.. I've seen a pirated XP install CD that installed the activation and wga cracks along with the rest of the OS, as well as all the updates that had been released at the time the CD was made.
Most things a typical user would want to do can be done in a graphical way, but it's good to have the configuration stored in hand editable text files. Having a fallback is always good incase something serious goes wrong, usually when something serious goes wrong with windows people reinstall which you could do with linux too, but having the choice is much better. Most of those users who hate having to edit a text file, would hate having to change registry keys too.
The situation is almost certainly going to improve tho... There was talk recently of at least one major OEM demanding that hardware they buy must have linux drivers available, and i doubt they will accept anything marked as beta. Component makers can't afford to lose large OEM contracts. With companies like Dell now offering Ubuntu, it doesn't make financial sense to maintain completely different sources of components for linux and non-linux systems, they will try to use as many of the same parts across the board as they can. If some hardware has no linux drivers, that's a big disincentive to buy that hardware and then have to separately buy something else for other systems.
Most of the HP ones work just nicely, i have an all-in-one which has a printer and scanner in a single unit, and i would certainly call these entry-level. For higher end scanners, i believe any SCSI based scanner would work (there is actually a standard for SCSI scanners) but not sure how common these are anymore.
There is no standard "Linux Interface"... Just multiple different window managers. Unfortunately many of the common ones seem to try and emulate windows. I believe the Linux version of GIMP behaves in much the way you describe, but i usually run Windowmaker (which is mostly based on the nextstep window manager).
Frontier justice is somewhat self-policing... Most people wouldn't be too concerned about someone who ran a stop sign, or stole a loaf of bread. The vast majority of people however, would be very much concerned about someone looking at or creating child pornography. And really, someone who's committed such a sick crime deserves more punishment than the police are allowed to hand out.
Even with a dynamic address, you can track it to a particular customer of the ISP... Most ISP user agreements hold the customer liable if they let someone else use their connection, willingly or not.
Governments don't have to make their laws "morally right"... They just need to be able to enforce them, and that means ensuring that the people who oppose those laws are not well armed or numerous enough to remove you from government.
There are many laws that I and many other people personally disagree with, in many countries. Your example is far more extreme than most, but it still doesn't give you the right to simply ignore these laws. Sovereign nations have the right to create and enforce any laws they choose. If other countries disagree strongly enough with these laws, then they will grant you asylum if you choose to leave, and if enough of the population disagree strongly enough with the government they will attempt to overthrow the government.
If the law states that you cannot log IP addresses, and your CEO tells you to log them anyway you are well within your rights to refuse and he has no legal comeback, no employer can request you to break the law, by asking you to do that it is your employer that is breaking the law and it is your duty to refuse. Any problems that occur as a result of complying with the law are simply costs of doing business that you cannot avoid short of moving to a different jurisdiction. Just like Tax is a cost of doing business, and many companies move to various tax-havens where the laws tell them to pay a lower amount of tax.
Well, but that's a law REQUIRING them to do it... Therefore the mere existence of this law is notification enough. Better to know that they will log, and be vigilent, than to not know for sure and get caught out.
In the UK you must inform the other party that you intend to record them *before* you record anything... This is usually achieved by playing a recorded message before forwarding the call to an operator or interactive automated system (thus the caller hasn't had opportunity to say anything yet).
Stores are required to have a sign, clearly visible *BEFORE* you enter the store (or before you enter any outside area which is visible from a camera) declaring the presence of cameras. You are free to read this sign, and refuse to enter the area covered by the camera.
Similarly if a company wishes to record a phone call, they must announce their intention to record the call upon answering and before you have opportunity to say anything (or before the recording equipment is turned on)... Typically this involves a recorded message before you are forwarded to an operator or any kind of interactive system.
US laws don't apply to people living in Germany, despite what a large number of americans seem to believe nowadays. Similarly, German laws don't apply elsewhere, so you could simply host your website in another country, but you might have to go to the extent of having a foreign entity actually "owning" the site. Hosting in Germany is expensive anyway, many German companies and individuals host their sites elsewhere already.
There are 2^32 potential IP addresses, thats 4294967296... And you can decrease that number considerably by removing addresses that will never appear in internet-facing logs (127.x 10.x 192.168.x, plus all the blocks currently unallocated or reserved)... Unless the hash algorithm was ridiculously complex, it wouldn't take all that long to brute force, and a database of every possible hash wouldn't be all that big either, not relative to the rainbow tables used for common password hashing techniques.
I would actually welcome a software audit, it would be fairly amusing... The only commercial software i have, is a copy of OSX that came with my macbook, and a significant number of machines running mostly linux, one or two running solaris.
Actually there are differences, very important ones.
The pirated copy is *BETTER*.
You don't have to deal with WGA You don't have the hassle of re-activating it if you upgrade/change your hardware You often don't have the hassle of entering and storing (without losing) the license key when you reinstall And the obvious - that it's cheaper
Well, if you run modern versions of windows you already give a monopolistic corporation unlimited access to (and control over) your infrastructure... You even explicitly agreed to it in the EULA.
Why do Sun demand that ownership is signed over, can't they just accept dual licensing - that is you license it under the LGPL and license it specifically to Sun under other terms (eg BSD) so they can reuse it in staroffice.
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Very true...
I was called round to someone who's ADSL wasn't working and hadn't been all day. It turned out, that there was an outage on the telecom's network but while on the phone to the ISP's support line they either had no idea, or were trying to cover up their own outage. So they ran off their usual script, and eventually blamed the hardware.
When i came round in the evening, the outage had ended so it came back up immediately.
I have no idea to be honest... I can't imagine their support for windows would be that bad, or there would be plenty of people complaining about them.
That said, i have only used mine on Linux and OSX on which I have no complaints.
With more competition in the OS market (ie different vendors following the same set of standards so you could pick and choose easily) this wouldn't happen.
If vendor X only offered a half assed version, aside from pirate versions you'd also be able to get a legitimate system from vendor Y which offered the same or more features.
Must have been a fairly old crack..
I've seen a pirated XP install CD that installed the activation and wga cracks along with the rest of the OS, as well as all the updates that had been released at the time the CD was made.
Most things a typical user would want to do can be done in a graphical way, but it's good to have the configuration stored in hand editable text files. Having a fallback is always good incase something serious goes wrong, usually when something serious goes wrong with windows people reinstall which you could do with linux too, but having the choice is much better.
Most of those users who hate having to edit a text file, would hate having to change registry keys too.
The situation is almost certainly going to improve tho...
There was talk recently of at least one major OEM demanding that hardware they buy must have linux drivers available, and i doubt they will accept anything marked as beta. Component makers can't afford to lose large OEM contracts.
With companies like Dell now offering Ubuntu, it doesn't make financial sense to maintain completely different sources of components for linux and non-linux systems, they will try to use as many of the same parts across the board as they can. If some hardware has no linux drivers, that's a big disincentive to buy that hardware and then have to separately buy something else for other systems.
But you are running a beta... It's expected to have problems.
Most of the HP ones work just nicely, i have an all-in-one which has a printer and scanner in a single unit, and i would certainly call these entry-level.
For higher end scanners, i believe any SCSI based scanner would work (there is actually a standard for SCSI scanners) but not sure how common these are anymore.
There is no standard "Linux Interface"... Just multiple different window managers. Unfortunately many of the common ones seem to try and emulate windows.
I believe the Linux version of GIMP behaves in much the way you describe, but i usually run Windowmaker (which is mostly based on the nextstep window manager).
Photoshop (at least on the mac) behaves like that too by default...
Frontier justice is somewhat self-policing...
Most people wouldn't be too concerned about someone who ran a stop sign, or stole a loaf of bread. The vast majority of people however, would be very much concerned about someone looking at or creating child pornography. And really, someone who's committed such a sick crime deserves more punishment than the police are allowed to hand out.
Even with a dynamic address, you can track it to a particular customer of the ISP...
Most ISP user agreements hold the customer liable if they let someone else use their connection, willingly or not.
Governments don't have to make their laws "morally right"... They just need to be able to enforce them, and that means ensuring that the people who oppose those laws are not well armed or numerous enough to remove you from government.
There are many laws that I and many other people personally disagree with, in many countries. Your example is far more extreme than most, but it still doesn't give you the right to simply ignore these laws.
Sovereign nations have the right to create and enforce any laws they choose. If other countries disagree strongly enough with these laws, then they will grant you asylum if you choose to leave, and if enough of the population disagree strongly enough with the government they will attempt to overthrow the government.
If the law states that you cannot log IP addresses, and your CEO tells you to log them anyway you are well within your rights to refuse and he has no legal comeback, no employer can request you to break the law, by asking you to do that it is your employer that is breaking the law and it is your duty to refuse. Any problems that occur as a result of complying with the law are simply costs of doing business that you cannot avoid short of moving to a different jurisdiction. Just like Tax is a cost of doing business, and many companies move to various tax-havens where the laws tell them to pay a lower amount of tax.
Well, but that's a law REQUIRING them to do it...
Therefore the mere existence of this law is notification enough.
Better to know that they will log, and be vigilent, than to not know for sure and get caught out.
In the UK you must inform the other party that you intend to record them *before* you record anything...
This is usually achieved by playing a recorded message before forwarding the call to an operator or interactive automated system (thus the caller hasn't had opportunity to say anything yet).
Stores are required to have a sign, clearly visible *BEFORE* you enter the store (or before you enter any outside area which is visible from a camera) declaring the presence of cameras.
You are free to read this sign, and refuse to enter the area covered by the camera.
Similarly if a company wishes to record a phone call, they must announce their intention to record the call upon answering and before you have opportunity to say anything (or before the recording equipment is turned on)... Typically this involves a recorded message before you are forwarded to an operator or any kind of interactive system.
US laws don't apply to people living in Germany, despite what a large number of americans seem to believe nowadays.
Similarly, German laws don't apply elsewhere, so you could simply host your website in another country, but you might have to go to the extent of having a foreign entity actually "owning" the site.
Hosting in Germany is expensive anyway, many German companies and individuals host their sites elsewhere already.
There are 2^32 potential IP addresses, thats 4294967296... And you can decrease that number considerably by removing addresses that will never appear in internet-facing logs (127.x 10.x 192.168.x, plus all the blocks currently unallocated or reserved)...
Unless the hash algorithm was ridiculously complex, it wouldn't take all that long to brute force, and a database of every possible hash wouldn't be all that big either, not relative to the rainbow tables used for common password hashing techniques.
I would actually welcome a software audit, it would be fairly amusing...
The only commercial software i have, is a copy of OSX that came with my macbook, and a significant number of machines running mostly linux, one or two running solaris.
Actually there are differences, very important ones.
The pirated copy is *BETTER*.
You don't have to deal with WGA
You don't have the hassle of re-activating it if you upgrade/change your hardware
You often don't have the hassle of entering and storing (without losing) the license key when you reinstall
And the obvious - that it's cheaper
Well, if you run modern versions of windows you already give a monopolistic corporation unlimited access to (and control over) your infrastructure... You even explicitly agreed to it in the EULA.
Why do Sun demand that ownership is signed over, can't they just accept dual licensing - that is you license it under the LGPL and license it specifically to Sun under other terms (eg BSD) so they can reuse it in staroffice.
Out of curiosity, if a customer were to send you files in ODF what would you do?